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Monthly Archives: January 2014

“You can’t reason someone out of a belief they weren’t reasoned into.” I really could have included this in Part 1 as the very first entry, since this may well be the single most insidious, self-defeating, and quite simply wrong (and yet despite all this, maddeningly common) cliché in the entire atheist lexicon. Matt Dillahunty once served up as thorough an eviscerating of this cliché as one could possibly imagine, to which I have very little to add. But on a personal note, I will just say that I’ve spoken with hundreds of atheists about their “deconversion” stories, and I can count on one hand the number who were not “reasoned out” of religion, regardless of what their initial reasons for believing may have been.

“It is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than for him to enter the kingdom of heaven”. While not as egregious an example as the “slay them before me” passage, this is also an example of a Bible verse that’s often unfairly taken out of context when attempting to point out the absurdity of the Bible, or simply to make the claim that the Bible says the rich cannot enter heaven. After all, the passage immediately following it makes clear that it’s intentionally describing a physically impossible scenario in order to make the point that even seemingly impossible things are possible “with God”. There are plenty of actual errors, absurdities, and contradictions in the Bible. This isn’t one of them.

“If there’s a god, why does he allow so much evil and suffering in the world?” For many atheists (and theists), this is the big one. Even Bart Ehrman–who has perhaps done more than anyone else to educate the public about the Bible’s countless flaws and contradictions–cites the Problem of Evil as the main issue which led him away from theism. But the Problem of Evil is only a disproof of the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, not all “gods” in general. And such a god concept is no more probable than a “god” which is apathetic (or even evil), or a god which has limited power. If anything, the traditional god concept is inherently LESS probable (if not impossible) simply due to the logically contradictory nature of having mutually exclusive attributes, which renders the Problem of Evil something of a moot point. In other words, while we have plenty of reasons to disbelieve in the existence of gods, just because God may be an asshole (which the God of the Bible certainly is) doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. The problem with invoking this phrase to dismiss religious claims is that it implies that the claim in question has “ordinary” evidence going for it, but simply lacks “extraordinary” evidence. But that’s FAR too generous when it comes to most religious claims, which typically fail to meet even “ordinary” standards of evidence (and in many cases lack any evidence whatsoever beyond an unsupportable claim of divine revelation).

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”. What are the four Gospels of the New Testament? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John of course. Which matches their order in the Bible, and matches the order they were written in according to the Catholic church and Christian tradition. The only problem: It’s wrong. And not only is it wrong, but the fact that it’s wrong is surprisingly devastating to the credibility of the gospel accounts and the Bible overall. And yet, despite this, you will often (if not always) hear even atheists referring to the gospels in the “stock” order, thereby perpetuating the myth of when they were actually written, and obscuring–however slightly–precisely what the church has tried to obscure.

In actuality Mark was written well before Matthew (which copied extensively from Mark), yet Mark has no birth narrative; it mentions nothing of Jesus being born of a virgin; it has the fewest miracles, the least-grandiose miracles, and presents the most “human” characterization of Jesus. Even the way Jesus speaks in Mark is dramatically different than in the later gospels. And perhaps most damning, Mark does not even contain a “resurrection” of Jesus per-se (Mark ends at the discovery of an empty tomb, and mentions nothing about Jesus appearing to anyone afterwards; of course that didn’t prevent early Christians from tacking-on a resurrection story to Mark, many years after it was written).

All of these issues are far less problematic if Matthew was written first, and if Mark were simply a condensed account of the “original” gospel… which is precisely the excuse that Christian apologists claim. But for Mark to be the first gospel account, and for it to leave out such critical details? That’s much harder (and probably impossible) to explain without acknowledging that those elements were later fabrications.

Mark, Matthew, and Luke never got to do this.

“I have better sources of morality than a 2,000 year-old book”. I’ll often hear people emphasize how ridiculously outdated the Bible is by referring to it as “2,000 years old”. But not only is that not accurate, it actually does the Bible a favor by obscuring the fact that the Bible’s origins do not even come close to coinciding with the events that it purportedly describes. In actuality the books of the New Testament were written beginning approximately 50 CE (decades after Jesus’ death) and were finished at some point in the 2nd (perhaps even 3rd) century. The books were then collected into what we now know as “the Bible” at some point well into the 4th century.

Obviously calling the Bible a “2,000 year old book” is much easier to write and say than “a collection of books written somewhere between 2,800 and 1,960 years ago which were collected for the first time in their current form about 1,650 years ago”. But the use of the “2,000 year old” shorthand suggests that the Bible goes all the way back to the lifetime of Jesus–as if it provides a contemporaneous account of his words and deeds–as opposed to being separated from them by at least a full generation. And by doing so, the Bible’s critics are unintentionally implying a greater degree of legitimacy to the Bible than it actually deserves.

References to immoral/evil acts committed by characters in the Bible. Even the most ardent Christians will admit that the Bible contains a lot of fucked-ed up people doing really fucked-ed up things. But just because the Bible describes individuals doing fucked-ed up things doesn’t mean it necessarily endorses those acts (polygamy, adultery, murder, incest, etc). On the other hand there are plenty of stories where the Bible clearly DOES endorse some of the most depraved acts imaginable: mock execution, offering one’s own daughters to be raped by a mob, slavery, and mass genocide. Those are the stories we should focus on instead.

This is what theologians mean when they refer to “Objective Morality”.

“Why couldn’t God just…” As a general rule, when atheists raise objections to the Bible in the form of a question, it’s not that they lack knowledge on the subject; it’s they have too much knowledge to not see through the bullshit. And in most cases it’s not that they “don’t know the answer”, there simply is no answer. But the problem with rhetorical questions is when people don’t take them as rhetorical. And the problem with non-rhetorical questions is that they imply a lack of knowledge and/or a lack of understanding on the part of the person posing them, even when the complete opposite is the case. That makes it easy for Christians to dismiss “questions” out of hand, and plays right into the stock Christian responses of “God works in mysterious ways” or “the mind of God is beyond our mortal comprehension” or similar such bullshit. Phrasing objections as statements—instead of as questions—prevents this issue.

“Atheists can be moral too”, or “You don’t need God to be good”. Both of these statements are absolutely true, but saying we “can” be moral implies that as a general rule we’re not, and saying that you don’t “need” religion still suggests that religion might make us better people than we already are. Yet the truth is that when compared to the religious, atheists are statistically more “moral” than virtually any other demographic group, often by the very same metrics that the religious emphasize most. For example in the United States, on a per-capita basis, atheists commit less crime, have lower rates of divorce, have lower incidence of teen pregnancy, lower rates of STD’s, higher levels of education… And the same holds true when you break it down worldwide; the nations with the highest rates of voluntary atheism have the least crime, the lowest corruption, and (with the sole exception of the United States) the highest standards of living in the world. By virtually any objective metric you can think of (sadly, with the exception of charitable donations), atheists are more moral than the religious, not less.